Chicago Police Don't Arrest As Many Murderers As You Might Think

CHICAGO — Sometimes, all you need is patience to solve murders. Here’s how it works: Once a person who homicide detectives suspect of murder dies that's it — case closed.

There's no arrest. No trial or jail time. No justice for a victim’s family. The case gets “cleared exceptionally," which is a sub-category of shooting and murder statistics that most police departments don’t talk about when they release their annual batting average for solving slayings.

So, when you heard, for instance, the shocking news that Chicago police department’s murder clearance rate last year was 53 percent — a stark improvement from the 29 percent clearance rate in 2016 — you may have mistakenly believed that meant cops caught more killers last year.

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Don’t beat yourself up. It’s an honest mistake. The murder clearance rate, after all, is fuzzy math, calculated by police department statisticians who don't like to show their work, that misleads the public. I’ve been writing about the confusing way that shooting and murder clearance rates are calculated for a long time now.

In 2010, Chicago police reported solving 18 percent of the 1,812 non-fatal shootings the year before. More than half of those were cleared exceptionally which means about 91-percent of people who shot-and-wounded someone in Chicago didn’t get arrested.

In 2012, when 506 people were murdered in Chicago, police reportedly solved 129 killings, a 25-percent clearance rate, the lowest in 21 years. But take away the 12 homicides (9-percent of the “solved cases”) that were cleared exceptionally that year, and subtract the 31 murders from previous years that got cleared without an arrest, and you've got a clearer picture of how many people who committed murder in 2012 didn’t get arrested.

For decades, City Hall has engaged in a political shell game drawing the public’s focus to confusing crime statistics presented in ways meant to sway the public opinion, if only for a news cycle or two, that the current administration has made Chicago a safer place to live.

Opaque statistics used to measure the effectiveness of the Chicago police department’s investigative arm charged with solving shootings and murders that plague poor, forgotten parts of town continue to be presented to the public with smoke and mirrors.

In my experience, when a reporter presses Chicago police bureaucrats to explain the city’s trouble arresting people involved in shootings and murders they stand by whatever statistical computation results in the most favorable narrative.

In October, Chicago chief of detectives, Mellissa Staples, tried a different tact. She blamed a media “misconception” that the police department’s homicide clearance rates were as low 15.4 percent.

“Those numbers are alarming . . . but our homicide clearance rates are not, and have never been, that low. . . .We have cleared more murders year to date than we have any of the last nine years,” Staples told Crain’s Chicago Business.

And it’s true. Chicago did clear a lot more cases once newly elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot put the screws to the department for abysmal homicide clearance rates much lower than New York City and Los Angeles, which reported 87-and 76-percent murder solve rates in 2018, according to the Murder Accountability Project.

But not how you might think.

On Friday, Sun-Times crime reporter Frank Main explained the convoluted homicide-solving equation that calculated the Chicago police department’s sudden 50-percent increase in cleared homicides in 2019: “Closing more murder cases even though no one was arrested pumped up the high clearance rate the Chicago Police Department has touted.”

Of the 261 murders that Chicago police “cleared” last year, 152 were cleared “exceptionally,” including a 1996 murder in a tavern that got added to the tally because the unnamed “offender” died. In all 58-percent of the cleared murders didn’t result in an arrest, Main reported.

Another way to look at it: Chicago police made 109 homicide arrests in 2019, a year when 486 people were murdered. That would make Chicago’s murder clearance rate with arrests about 22 percent.

Taking note of the number of “exceptional” clearances shouldn’t be taken to suggest that Chicago police brass are cooking the books. People who know about the inter-workings of the CPD detective division will tell you that’s assuming too much. What’s more likely is that while under intense political pressure to improve clearance rates, work-a-day cops finalized paperwork on cold cases that meet the low standard for clearing a homicide “exceptionally.”

But that’s not what’s important.

If we’re ever going to understand why Chicago police continue to solve a significantly lower percentage of homicides than cops in New York and Los Angeles, we’ve got to stop relying on, and arguing about, confusing statistics.

The way the murder clearance rate is calculated doesn't provide perspective on how difficult it is to solve a murder in this town — where the “no-snitch” code of silence on the street persuades witnesses to keep quiet, and the “Thin Blue Line” code of silence in the police department has devastated the public’s trust in law enforcement legitimacy.

What people living in the most violent corners of Chicago deserve to know is how often cooperating with police in a murder investigation leads to arrests and convictions that provide justice for the families of victims and takes killers off the street.

Knowing that the death of a person suspected of killing Larry Stubitsch in 1966 helped Chicago police boost the department’s murder clearance rate in 2019 almost seems like a dirty trick.

Chicago needs a better way to measure the police department’s success solving murders — a calculation that tells the public how many killers avoid arrest for, say, a year or even longer, and establishes a clearance rate that police can improve over time, one that the public can understand and trust.

An equation that might lead to better results.

I'm not a math whiz, but I'll take a crack at it. In January, 34 people were murdered in Chicago.

Next year, let's add up the homicide arrests for those cases, divide by 34 and ask, “Why?”

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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